What factors help explain the ease with which Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were able to conquer so m

What factors help explain the ease with which Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were able to conquer so much of Europe and Africa from 1933 to 1941? What problems in the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain made resistance to German and Italian aggression difficult?
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The... show more What factors help explain the ease with which Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were able to conquer so much of Europe and Africa from 1933 to 1941? What problems in the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain made resistance to German and Italian aggression difficult?

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The years 1933 to 1942 saw the rise and expansion of Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and militarism in Japan. These empires expanded their territory and military power at the expense of their smaller neighbors, many of them new nations created by the Treaty of Versailles. The League of Nations, helpless to stem aggression, and the United States, guided by a policy of isolationism, stood largely aside as Europe and Asia descended into crisis. By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland and threatened to invade Great Britain, a longtime ally of the United States. It was not until Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii -- a U.S. territory, though not yet a state -- that the U.S. entered the world-wide conflict. World War II spanned the globe, with battles fought in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States (or its territories). The war did not end until Italy was occupied, Germany was invaded by U.S. and Russian forces, and the two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.

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Best Answer: Well Fascist Italy's record of conquest is abysmal to be blunt. So I'll concentrate on Germany.
Germany's territorial demands from 1933 -1939 were to a large degree legitimate. HOWEVER, the passivity of the Allies to German rearmament, and the de facto recognition of it with the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935, encouraged German aggression in Central and Eastern Europe. There was no doubt that Hitler wanted to destroy the Soviet Union, and thereby create "lebensraum" for the new German Empire (or "Reich"). He was willing to cut a deal with Poland -who had defeated the USSR in 1920, to allow him to station troops and use Poland as a springboard into the USSR. Poland's gov't distrusted the Nazis almost as much as the Communists refused. Speaking of the communists, one of the reasons the western allies were reluctant to contain Hitler was some of the elites some him as a buffer against Soviet expansionism. Militarily Poland had one of the largest standing armies in Europe (larger than the German army until 1936), so they didn't feel threatened.
Militarily, the reason for German military superiority from 1939 until 1943 (or '44) was threefold: doctrine, leadership, and equ;ipment.
Doctrinally, the Germans had appropriated some ideas originating in France and the UK about operating tanks in mass, with infantry, artillery, and engineers. You might have heard the term "blitzkrieg"-this is what it means. Probing for weak points, then exploiting them with massed attacks. (BTW "blitzkrieg" is a German propaganda term, even today German officers use "Combined Arms" to describe operations in WW2). They took it much farther, and added in the idea of what is now called "close air support". This doctrine was revoutionary in its day, and overwhelmed the WW1 indoctrinated armies they opposed.
AFA leadership, the Wehrmacht instilled in its junior officers and senior non-commissioned officers the idea of taking initiative and acting in the absence of orders. The training programs for both were much tougher than the Allies-even up to 1944. The troops had confidence in the leaders, and in their equipment, though they were often outnumbered (as in France, North Africa, and frequently in Russia).
German equipment in many ways was technologically superior to the Allies, better machine guns for greater firepower at the squad level, armored carriers for infantry and engineers to accompany the tanks, more flexible artillery. The single most important equipment factor was: two-way radio communication in their tanks. NO other army had this until 1942 or even later in the case of the Soviets. Combining this instantaneous communication with the initiative of junior leaders, well you read the results. Keep in mind that in France, the Germans faced more and technically superior French armor.

Militarily Italy was a joke. The Italian army had success against the Ethiopians because the Italians used airplanes mounted with machine guns and bombs, used poison gas, and had grenades and modern rifles. Even so the terrain was so rugged an the military targets so few that the Italian army had a difficult time of it.
When Mussolini invaded Greece, the Greeks defeated him. The Germans had to come to thier rescue. Italy didn't invade France until France was already beaten by Germany (well, when Mussolini judged that it was beaten). When the British attacked the Italians in Libya, one of the Italian generals surrendered. The British commander went to parley and asked why he was surrendering. The Italian general was surrounded by boxes of ammunition, but he put his boot on a box of ammo and said, "As you can see, we are out of ammunition." To this the British commander remarked, "Never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few."
The Germans had an easy victory over the Poles because they launched a surprise attack and destroyed most of the Polish air force and tanks on the first day. The Russians invaded from the East, and the Poles were sliced to pieces.
The French army was considered the finest in Europe, but it was hunkered down behind its defensive perimeter the Maginot Line. The French had more tanks than the German army and their tanks were better as well, but General Guderian came up with the unprecedented idea of using tanks in a single mass to punch through the French front, with the infantry close behind. Nobody had seen this tactic before and it was terrifying. In Africa Rommel was another superb tank commander. The British and the Germans were more or less evenly matched in North Africa and Rommel wasn't defeated until the American army was thrown against him as well. Patton was a pretty good tank commander himself.
It was public sentiment that made resistance to German and Italian aggression difficult for the British and the French. Those two nations suffered severely in WW I and hardly anyone in Britain or France wanted another war with Germany.

Source(s): Friendly guy

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There is an argument there in the sense that the Germans had to delay Operation Barbarossa to assist the Italians and had to keep a lot of troops in Greece pinned down due to the guerrilla activity. Yet there is also a counterargument that says that Operation Barbarossa was doomed to fail anyway no matter what. Anyhow these are just academic arguments and and is not the point. The point is that a small country, insignificant at the time, that no one, neither the Axis, nor the Allies, up to that point paid much attention to, delivered the first decisive victory against the Axis powers, and shown to the rest of the world that they were not invisible.